UFC 101: Parting Shots

With a long-awaited lightweight title fight and a superfight between the current middleweight champion the former light heavyweight champion, UFC 101 definitely had the star power to stand on its own among a summer of gigantic fight cards.  Now that the fights are done and over with, who moved up and who took a big step back?  Read on for our UFC 101 Parting Shots.

Anderson Silva Shows That He’s Still the Best

I know that not everyone, including yours truly, had been happy with Anderson Silva’s strategies for his last couple of fights before Saturday night’s bout with Forrest Griffin.  With that being said, it still really couldn’t be argued convincingly that he wasn’t either at the top or near the top of the pound-for-pound rankings.  While his bouts against Patrick Cote and Thales Leites didn’t exactly inspire the usual awe, they also showed a guy who could toy with legitimately dangerous competition at will.  In the case of Anderson Silva, his showmanship may have been questioned, but his skill never really could be.

Against Forrest Griffin, we got a true vintage Silva performance.  Not only did Silva show his tendency to move around and somehow constantly avoid taking any kind of punishment, but he showed the kind of counter-punching and pinpoint accuracy that have been his trademark over his entire career.  The beauty of Silva’s technique is matched only by the savage results of his strikes.  Ask Forrest Griffin, who supposedly has suffered a dislocated jaw and could not hear out of one ear as last night came to a close.

What’s next for Silva?  Well, he was very coy in the post-fight press conference, though it was obvious that he’s not exactly excited at the prospects of either facing Dan Henderson again or his good buddy and light heavyweight champion, Lyoto Machida.  All that is certain, at least for me, is that this man is the world’s top pound-for-pound fighter, without a doubt.

Penn Defeats a Determined Kenny Florian

It was clear early on that Kenny Florian was trying to use a similar game plan to what Georges St. Pierre utilized against BJ Penn in their recent fight, when GSP was able to push Penn against the cage for a full round to wear him out before finally taking him down at will and punishing him.  However, when using such a game plan, it definitely helps to be Georges St. Pierre.  Florian is a very good fighter, but neither he nor anyone else in the lightweight division has the abilities and athleticism of GSP.

Instead, we saw Florian try to wear out Penn, a strategy which I was in disagreement with Joe Rogan about the effectiveness of.  Rogan repeatedly said he thought Penn was tiring, but every time there was a break in the clinch against the cage, Penn was throwing hard, crisp combinations that showed he had plenty left in the tank.  I think Penn was not only in better shape this go-round, but he had also learned not to expend too much energy against an opponent who just wants to wear him out while clinching with him against the fence.

All of a sudden, in the fourth round, it seemed like Penn just decided that he had had enough, and that the fight needed to end.  So there was a huge takedown, followed by some positional jiu-jitsu at the highest level, and what has become a trademark of Penn’s, a rear naked choke for the tap.  Looking back on it now, it almost seems as if Penn was allowing Florian to wear himself out with all that grappling against the cage, really.  Could we have just seen the MMA version of Ali’s “rope-a-dope”?  Either way, Penn is going to be extremely difficult for anyone to beat, as long as he remains as motivated as he has been.  Florian will be back, but if Penn is still on top, will it matter?

Early Stoppages Again Rear Their Ugly Heads

It seems that we can’t go a couple of events anymore without a stoppage that is controversial at best and downright horrible at worst.  Saturday night, we had the stoppage during the Amir Sadollah-Johny Hendricks fight, which interestingly enough came right before the rematch between Shane Nelson and Aaron Riley (which was itself a result of an early stoppage in their first fight).

I can’t say with any certainty that Hendricks wouldn’t have finished Sadollah anyway without another ten seconds if the fight had been allowed to continue, but isn’t the point of having the fights to know conclusively one way or another?  I don’t want to put fighters at any unnecessary risks, but let’s be honest here: fighting is an unnecessary risk itself, anyway.  Any fighter would agree that in the case of a fight like the one between Sadollah and Hendricks, they want to be able to decide the outcome for themselves. 

One thing that really could hurt the sport (though I won’t go as far as to say it would ruin it) is a plague of such early stoppages.  One of the reasons why MMA is the “it” sport right now is that it is a very real type of competition in a very fake world.  Everything these days is synthetic or watered-down, even the NFL and NHL, which were the official “manly” sport for North Americans for years, have had numerous ridiculous rule changes each year to try to make such sports safer, when they are by their very nature unsafe in the first place.

MMA is a sport where you are supposed to either beat your opponent unconscious or force them to quit.  While I am fully aware that fighters themselves are not savages, the sport itself involves what is a rather savage activity.  Even beautiful violence is still violence, and to overprotect the fighters to the extent that we saw in the Sadollah fight helps no one, and frustrates fans who are expecting fights to come to a more natural conclusion.  And what about Sadollah?  He trained for a full year to have a fight end controversially in a half minute.  Meanwhile, Hendricks gets a win that will be asterisked in the minds of so many, and probably end up having to rematch his opponent anyway in an effort to “settle it for good”.

It’s interesting that in the case of title fights, or showcase fights between veteran MMA fighters, it seems that the referees are far more willing to let competitors take a number of clean shots before intervening.  It’s not hard to think of an example: how about when Chuck Liddell was defeated by Randy Couture in their first fight?  Big John McCarthy did what he thought was right: he let a veteran of the sport get plenty of chances to recover and defend himself before stepping in.  No one called out McCarthy for his decision.  So, why does Sadollah’s fight get stopped when he is on all fours and having his head only grazed by wild punches from his opponent?  Are we to believe that in a title fight, human beings are somehow more able to take concussive blows to the head without serious injury?

One thing that MMA really needs to stay away from is becoming boxing without ten-counts, where the first time a fighter is knocked down, the fight is over.  It doesn’t serve the fighters and it doesn’t serve the fans, and it only undermines the sports efforts to be a pure form of competition where athletes determine the outcomes, not officials.

by Jon Hartley for Fightmania.com

Tags: Amir Sadollah, Anderson Silva, Chuck Liddell, Dan Henderson, Forrest Griffin, Georges St. Pierre, Kenny Florian, Lyoto Machida, Patrick Cote, Randy Couture, UFC